gonna be a big song if we could just nail it. It took us about six months to get back to it after that. But we finally did get back together - and nailed it.

There's a lot of people out there who just go through the motions - can't live without each other, but they're not really in that happy love anymore. The marriage has just pulled so far apart, but they don't do anything about it. Nobody has broke the promise yet, but at some point, someone's goin' to. Someone's going to have to leave, someone's going to have to stay. This song would be a suggestion to go get marriage therapy.

I've already had success with one happy divorce song ("I'm So Happy I Can't Stop Cryin'"). This is another song Chuck and I wrote that has a very infectious groove - that little poppin' at the front and singin' along with that melody at the same time. That rhythm made the song kind of hard to write because we were really locked in in terms of the lyric. We had so many syllables to cram in there. It was very challenging.

As hard-core as it is, somethin' about this song is still light; there's a shrug about it.

This is a heavy-duty rocker. I wanted to do somethin' Southern rock. It's just a fun song - it sounds like good Skynyrd, my kind of summertime, outdoor, live, go-getcha song.

I wrote this for my son Stelen and his mother after watching 'em the last two years.

Scott came in with the title and said he wanted to write the song with me. We got the first verse pretty much done, and then we let it lay there for three or four months. I was already in the studio recording and had gone out to a friend's house to play basketball. Scott was there. He said, "Do you care if I stop by your bus after this game and bring a guitar?" So he did. I'd forgotten we wrote that first little verse, and he started playing it. I said, "I remember that! I love that!" So we started workin' on it again that night. I went into the studio the next day, and (producer James) Stroud said, "What's next?" I grabbed a guitar and said, "This is it." "She Only Gets That Way With Me" is very tender. It's one of my favorites.

Jim had a cut on each of my last two albums. His song on the last one was called "I Don't Understand My Girlfriend and She Don't Understand Me, Too." On the record before that, it was "Hello." "Die With Your Boots On" is just bizarre. It's typical of me lettin' my hair down.

This is from listen' to too many Boz Skaggs records in my life.

This song ain't got but about 12 words in it. The simplicity and the retro-coolness of it just attacked me. When I was a little boy, my mother had some records by Tommy Overstreet. To me, this has the undertones of Tommy Overstreet, especially the clear baritone. I just thought it sounded like nothing else I had heard in years.

This is a complicated song. It's about somebody who's hurt so bad that in order to survive, he must completely blot the pain and the reason for it out of his mind. This woman comes back into his life after a while, and he's like, "There's somethin' on the tip of my heart. There's somethin' that could roll right off my tongue - your name. There's somethin' about you that is real familiar to me, but I can't put my finger on it." These two were as close as they could be, and the only way he could get through the hurt of their parting was to forget she ever existed. The song doesn't really tell you what he did to forget her, only that she simply could not remain as a memory in his mind.

This just sounded like a hit to me, and it's one of Stroud's favorites. It's a magnificent idea, about a guy saying the only wwall he can't get through, the only wall he hits day after day, is the ex-love in his life. He can't get past it.

Subscribe to the Newsletter
Name	Email

[ To the Welcome Page | To the "g" Files ]

Top